


Oversight

by FyrDrakken



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-24
Updated: 2007-07-24
Packaged: 2017-10-07 12:46:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/65287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrDrakken/pseuds/FyrDrakken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was simply untrue that he'd never considered the possibility that "John Smith" might fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oversight

It was simply untrue that he'd never considered the possibility that "John Smith" might fall in love.

That was the whole point of leaving Martha the watch.

The watch, and a rather deliberate gap in the list of instructions he'd given her.

* * * * * * *

So many other ways to deal with the Family of Blood. The masquerade as "John Smith" leapt so readily to mind because it was such a wonderful excuse to just lay it all down. All the baggage, the losses and the burden of his own history. The only way for the last of the Time Lords to have a normal life was to become normal.

It was horribly tempting to end his days as John Smith, as a boring normal human living a commonplace life.

But it was such a responsibility, being the only one left to tie up all the loose ends the Time Lords had kept tucked away. He'd done good in his time -- not just slight nudges to history to give a more favorable outcome here and there, but actual corrections to external tampering. With him gone, who knew how long creation would hold together?

He wanted to bow out, though -- so very badly.

So he left the choice with Martha.

* * * * * * *

It honestly never occurred to him that if he fell in love as a human it wouldn't be with Martha.

And there was something so safe about letting Martha Jones and John Smith work things out for themselves. Because they both knew it wasn't really him, not the Doctor -- it was a safe normal human. If Martha stopped being interested, or they managed to completely cock things up between them, then all she had to do was open the watch and undo it all. He'd go back to being the Doctor, and they could both pretend John Smith had never happened.

And if things went well...

There was no hurry on opening the watch, really.

Of course the universe needed the last Time Lord.

But he could take a little sabbatical.

Months. Years, even.

So long as the watch was opened in the end, no harm done.

And if it was never opened... Well, he trusted Martha to keep it safe, and to pull it out eventually. She was smart and responsible and would restore him in due course.

And if "in due course" covered thirty or forty years -- well, he certainly had the time to spare...

* * * * * * *

It was a dodgy little human thing that tripped him up.

Oh, intellectually he knew that in some places and times they placed an excessive amount of weight on where one's ancestors hailed from or what particular silly little religion one followed or who one cared to hop into bed with. But those fads changed so much over the course of human history that he never really bothered to remember what the current vogue in bigotry was. It wasn't like any of them actually mattered, after all.

So it honestly didn't occur to him that the TARDIS might choose to deliberately land them in an era in which common ordinary average John Smith would treat Martha Jones as a part of the furniture.

The old girl was hedging her bets, of course. She wouldn't want to take a chance on John Smith living and dying with the watch remaining unopened, so she'd ensured otherwise. Very cleverly done, actually -- such a crafty little time capsule she'd become! Not only would John Smith never dream of laying a hand on the maid (let alone settling down and having a family with her), but Martha Jones would never dream of accepting the life 1913 would force her to. She'd bring him back to the TARDIS whether he wanted to go or not. And she'd never abandon John Smith -- even if he were a total bastard to her -- because he was her ride home.

Three months. A time period he'd chosen less for an estimate of the Family's remaining lifespan and more because it seemed to him ample time for nature to take its course, if it were going to. (Rose, he was quite certain, would have extracted a marriage proposal within six weeks -- two months at the outside -- and quite possibly chucked the watch in the nearest river shortly thereafter. He trusted Martha to be prudent enough to hold onto the watch, no matter what.)

Pity it turned out to be ample time for him to set his eye on someone else instead...

* * * * * * *

And it was so blasted unfair.

How many people had he loved over the centuries? (So many, so many. Very few of his companions hadn't been loved in one way or another.)

How many of them had loved him? (More than he wanted to admit to himself. He tried very hard not to notice if they did.)

How many had loved him and left him to marry someone else? (It still hurt, Jo having so quickly agreed to marry a man she'd barely met whom she'd said reminded her of him...)

How many would have been overjoyed to share a normal human life with him? (He didn't dare speculate. Leela had been willing to share a life with another Time Lord, which he still couldn't let himself think too deeply about.)

He'd meant this chance for Martha -- and they'd been cheated out of it. He'd offered it to someone else -- and she'd been willing to take it, until.

Until they found out "John Smith" was a shell, a facade. A hiding place for something far more complex and dangerous.

He couldn't blame Martha for interfering. She was promised to protect the last Time Lord, not John Smith's happiness. And it would have been cruel to doom her to several decades as a servant in a harsh era.

He couldn't blame the TARDIS for setting them down where she had. A TARDIS is nothing without a Time Lord.

He couldn't blame Joan for refusing to let him choose pleasure over duty. He would be kind, and assume that it was her devotion to duty that caused her to refuse him, rather than a distaste for what he'd turned out to be. It was a harder assumption to cling to after he'd offered her a second chance -- pleasure with duty -- and she rejected him a second time. He would be kind again, and choose to believe that she was merely being sensible enough to realize that a TARDIS was no place to play house in, and merciful enough not to let him cling overlong to an illusion that it could be.

He could blame the Family, for ruining his grand experiment so early. For not taking the chance he'd offered and instead trying to force the issue.

For costing the life the watch had shown he and Joan might have -- would have -- had.

The Doctor was alone in the universe. John Smith was one among millions of humans, and would have soon had a family of his own.

John Smith had offered the Family a second chance, and instead of taking it they'd cost him his children.

The Doctor gave them all the time in the universe to regret that choice.


End file.
